The new College Scorecard website was built on a data dump the size of Mt. Denali…in fact, it’s like data heaven for college data geeks!
HA! Try to put THIS genie back in the bottle.
Watch my video for a demonstration of College Scorecard’s main features.

Well, if this isn’t some fine payback by the Obama administration for all those who scuttled the President’s new college rating plan. And it’s so sincere and sounds so well-meaning that even the opposition is mumbling grudging kudos. But the word is out on colleges that don’t live up to their promises.

So much data, in such an easy-to-use format, built for mobile devices, rolled out just in time for students and their families to make critical decisions about colleges. Whatever the quality of the data, there will be some significant changes in the world of higher education. Tah dah!

Just in my ramblings around this new College Scorecard website at collegescorecard.ed.gov, I could not resist making a search for all medium and large “for-profit” schools. I kind of knew what the results would be, but it was worse than I thought. Apparently, nobody bothered to tell the University of Phoenix that their search results would show that EVERYONE who had attended their schools on all their campuses made salaries of $53,400 dollars after 10 years. Yep, everyone. Clerical error? Or, maybe Phoenix wants it that way.

And then I was wondering about where that data on the salaries of former students came from. And how about the data showing how former students were progressing with their loan repayments?
Well, turns out this info is new, never before seen in public. The federal government, apparently working for the common good, decided to combine the data from federal student loan borrowers with data from their tax records. This data produced lots of useful information. Some of it makes certain schools look good and some of it is very damaging for others. The data is out there for all to see and use.
I didn’t get to vote on the idea to combine this information, nor on the distribution of it. Did you?
Supposedly the personal identifiers have been removed from the data. Hope so.
Here are the assurances of privacy put forth in the data documentation for College Scorecard:

“All National Student Loan Data System (NSLDS) and Treasury elements are protected for privacy purposes; any data not reported in order to protect an individual’s privacy are shown as PrivacySuppressed.”

Is “Privacy Suppressed” what they really meant to say?

I don’t know about you, but I felt like my privacy was suppressed when my data was compromised at Target and at Home Depot!